Hello and thank you for visiting AikiWeb, the
world's most active online Aikido community! This site is home to
over 22,000 aikido practitioners from around the world and covers a
wide range of aikido topics including techniques, philosophy, history,
humor, beginner issues, the marketplace, and more.

If you wish to join in the discussions or use the other advanced
features available, you will need to register first. Registration is
absolutely free and takes only a few minutes to complete so sign up today!

It may or may not be worth going to the Culinary Institute. Anthony Bourdain and David Chang did, along with many others. But the important thing is, after they received their training and degree, they were free from any further alignment or politics with their particular institute.

And there are many chefs that received their training in the field, rather than at an institution. In fact, Bourdain now says he prefers, "hard-working and devoted but unlearned Ecuadorians to college graduates."

If you think neither of them is entangled in the politics of their particular field, I've got a nice restaurant in Brooklyn to sell you.

Now, I see your point, that the strict hierarchical structure of martial arts organizations is not found in other fields. But artists in other fields absolutely do care (and need to care) about being well-reviewed by the "right" critics and making connections with the "right" people who can help promote their work. In some ways, the atmosphere is *more* stifling because there *isn't* a clear hierarchy. They can do everything "right" and still fail, for completely opaque reasons.

And that's not even looking at the Japanese creative arts, which absolutely do have ranks and levels very similar to those found in the martial arts.

Given the widely diverse forms of Aikido practiced today, can you make a convincing case that "a radical and progressive evolution in Aikido" is necessary?

Hey Ron, so far in this thread there are have been contributions and citings by a number of aikidoka, including some serious heavyweights. I'll recap them, just so we can get a sense of progressive pattern emerging.

This is far from my idea, or any kind of "group" I'm trying to organize. See what the people below in the quotes have to say. And we're just getting started with this. I can list many many more.

Quote:

Corky Quakenbush wrote:

My students have attained a higher level of understanding of the principles of aiki within a year or two than I had come to understand in ten to twenty years of training in the technique emulation model.

Yamada:

Quote:

The ranking system in aikido is another headache. I personally disagree with this system. A teaching certificate is okay, a black belt is okay. But after that, no numbers, no shodan, no nidan, etc. The dan ranking system creates a competitive mind, because people judge others.

Yamada:

Quote:

The time of spreading aikido to the world is finished; now we have to focus on quality.

Ledyard:

Quote:

I think at the end of 8 to 10 yrs of training properly, we could end up with someone who currently operates at a fairly high Dan rank. In other words, after 8 - 10 years of training we would have someone who functions at or better than what passes for 6th dan at this point.

Okamoto:

Quote:

If we are to survive, we must appeal to the new generation. I want to update the old-fashioned image of Budo, without losing the essence.

Nishio:

Quote:

Budo must always reflect its surroundings. If it isn't newer and stronger, it isn't valid.

Now, I see your point, that the strict hierarchical structure of martial arts organizations is not found in other fields.

OK, good. We can agree on that. And we might go further and agree that the strict structure and ranking is predominately within Japanese martial arts. Chinese martial arts, Systema, Indian Yoga, etc. generally do not use kyu/dan ranking system, nor the strict hierarchical structure.

Quote:

But artists in other fields absolutely do care (and need to care) about being well-reviewed by the "right" critics and making connections with the "right" people who can help promote their work.

i propose that we should put an espresso machine on the shomen to increase the awareness. and to have coffee, with or without cream, sugar, and others natural (whiskey) and unnatural (nutmeg) flavors, during meditation before and after class. there will be no instant coffee allowed, unless it's an emergency situation where we are out of beans or bugs. i am pretty sure this will increase aikido quality greatly.

LOL. Yeh, that's kind of scary, Mary. I guess we could add cults and MLM to that as well.

We could add a lot of things to that, Dan. It's quite possible we could add most organized human activities. Education? Has it in spades; academics practically invented hierarchies. Tennis? Try picking up a casual game at your local public court, and chances are you'll be asked what your rating is. And so on, and so forth.

So, while I take your point that "kowtowing" as you put it isn't terribly functional behavior, I suspect it's more common than otherwise. If that's the case, it seems to me that you don't solve it by creating a "third wave" of whatever your activity is; that's just a revolution that will simply create another hierarchy in its turn, with a different set of idols to bow down to. Maybe you don't solve it at all within the context of a large group of humans, some of whom will inevitably try to create such a hierarchy and most of whom will not understand the dynamic well enough to resist it. So is the most important element of your "third wave" a restriction on size? No organization beyond the most rudimentary level?

Tennis? Try picking up a casual game at your local public court, and chances are you'll be asked what your rating is. And so on, and so forth.
... creating a "third wave" of whatever your activity is; that's just a revolution that will simply create another hierarchy in its turn, with a different set of idols to bow down to.

I don't think so.

Hierarchy is no longer inevitable. Network is the paradigm of organization that is steadily replacing the old hierarchies across all areas of human endeavor. Technologically hierarchy is fighting a rearguard action -- but the tools they are forced to use are themselves the tools of network -- and the dissonance gets greater and greater, as hierarchy gets more precarious, and the stakes get higher. Governance systems do not require hierarchy. Knowledge does not require hierarchy. Standards do not require hierarchy. One can make the case in fact that hierarchy is inversely associated with all three of these goods.

Networks begin in places like this. Networks have no central authority. Recognition and network access is mutual and reciprocal. To access a network you have to be open to access by the other nodes in the network, and no node gets to dictate the processing done by any other nodes. What network participants agree on is universally useful standards of communication and common access protocols, and in some limited and usually temporary projects, common processing.

Please give an example of a successful large organization without hierarchy.

No, you can't use the Web. Not unless you're able to set up a server and provide a link that average people can use without reference to an internet service provider, a DNS provider and/or a domain registrar. And that they can find without using a search engine.

Please give an example of a successful large organization without hierarchy.

No, you can't use the Web. Not unless you're able to set up a server and provide a link that average people can use without reference to an internet service provider, a DNS provider and/or a domain registrar. And that they can find without using a search engine.

The Catholic Church. It was a nearly pure network of local bishops and abbots and yet prevailed over the most successful hierarchical organization in history, the Roman Empire-- and survived the disaster that killed that empire finally, plus a later plague that killed a third of Christendom.

Its fractious decline into the Greek and Protestant schisms was exactly in keeping with the degree to which it insisted upon hierarchical privileges of the pagan Roman administrative organs it had inherited after the Empire ceased to exist around it (pontiff was a Roman religious office long before it was Christian). The strong revival of the Church after the disasters of the twentieth century's successive world wars has brought the near end of these schisms -- and has occurred in keeping with the steady abandonment of the hierarchical mode in favor of the collegial. Since the beginning and even now each bishop is functionally and legally independent in all but a very few functions -- mostly relating to the succession as bishop, and dispensation from certain grave sacramental irregularities. Bishops are in communion with each other and the Pope and that makes the Catholic Church. FWIW the Pope is the oldest elective office -- by far.

Like clergy and laity, there always teachers and students-- that is a given -- but in practical arts that relationship is meant to be superseded to one of more relative equality through learning. Though dignity of precedence and role is and should be observed out of due honor -- a teacher should also want and hope for students who surpass him. Hierarchy dependence is different than that kind of situational dependence and it healthy and mutual economy of growth in skill and dignity.

A good resource on thoughts regarding hierarchy versus networks is Niall Ferguson with a book of that title. Another more naturalistic way of looking at it as a kind of scaling law -- local hierarchies may work -- remote one's don't work well, and maximal hierarchies can't work at all, ultimately. They keep collapsing. It's a sign.

It also seems odd to call the Protestant schism a repudiation of hierarchy, since it only came 1500 years into the Catholic project and led to a reassertion of "official" doctrine by the Roman authorities. (Which was reaffirmed four hundred years later and holds to this day.)

Katherine

ObAikido: Interesting class this evening, with some ukemi, flow, and timing exercises I hadn't seen before.

It also seems odd to call the Protestant schism a repudiation of hierarchy, since it only came 1500 years into the Catholic project...

You miss the point entirely. The Church is a complete longitudinal study in network versus hierarchy. Network prevailed in the first phase. It captured and only then imitated Roman hierarchy. Then the secular hierarchy collapsed and the Church necessarily returned to network mode, building the great monastic institutions that preserved learning through the Dark Ages, and formed the great correspondent Universities to pass on that knowledge.

Then as the Germans imitated the Roman hierarchies to create Feudal hierarchy under the non-Holy, non-Roman, non-Empire, the Church followed suit. Then result of this competition for preeminence contributed to the schism with the Greeks.

Then as the nation states began to imitiate the imperial hierachies in miniature, the Church did continued its competition for hierarchy. That competition with the rise of nation states contributed to failure of the near healing of the Greek schism at the Second Council of Lyon in 1274. The Protestant criticism that then arose in the increasingly nationalized churches was not entirely wrong, as the Counter-Reformation acknowledged. The Counter- Reformation is only now nearing a sense of completion in the rapprochement among many Protestant lineages and the essential end of the schism with the Greek and Eastern Churches.

Aikido needs to take a page from the Dark Age and medieval pattern of networked repositories of learning, which saved and spread much that would otherwise have been lost. Much hierarchy around the world is teetering into chaos. You can look to the Yamabushi, if you prefer, or the Buddhist experience with hierarchy over network, but the pattern has relevance across cultures. India has almost no Buddhists because Buddhism wedded itself there to the Ashokan state and it did not long survive their mutual collapse, but thrived at and beyond the fringes of India. The collapse into rival national states until the Mongols came, mirrors the European middle ages and renaissance.

Hierarchy is no longer inevitable. Network is the paradigm of organization that is steadily replacing the old hierarchies across all areas of human endeavor. Technologically hierarchy is fighting a rearguard action -- but the tools they are forced to use are themselves the tools of network -- and the dissonance gets greater and greater, as hierarchy gets more precarious, and the stakes get higher.

What do you mean by "Technologically"? Within the field of technology? Isn't that a rather narrow slice of human endeavor, as contrasted with "all areas"?

Quote:

Erick Mead wrote:

Governance systems do not require hierarchy. Knowledge does not require hierarchy. Standards do not require hierarchy. One can make the case in fact that hierarchy is inversely associated with all three of these goods.

You missed my point entirely. It's not a matter of what is required, nor what is functional, nor what is good. It's a matter of what human beings tend to do. What is best for us, what we are capable of, what our potential is...all of these are distinct (and far too often not overlapping) with what we actually do.

Is hierarchy inevitable? I'd argue that it isn't...but I'd also argue that it's a human tendency. The creation of hierarchy is the result of collective inaction/inertia on the part of the many, of good intentions on the part of some, and of energetic greed, empire-building and the desire to be on top of the pile on the part of a few. If you want to create a collective human endeavor without hierarchy, it must start with a very clear vision of what you want (and a realistic recognition of these human tendencies), and be followed thereafter with a constant struggle to prevent hierarchy from creeping in. It can't start from a "clear vision" on the part of a single iconoclast with a soapbox; an iconoclast's so-called "vision" is an anti-vision, by definition. It has to start with a vision of what you want to create, and it has to inspire more than just you and the mouse in your pocket. And not only does it not have to start with a vision that is broadly shared, but I'd argue that it's a mistake to start by seeking broad support. Inspire a few, then put your money where your mouth is. Create the thing you claim to want, even on the smallest scale, and inspire more people by the evidence of its merits. Proselytism always smacks of desperation.

One of the ideas here is that we're moving away from structured "organizations" and "heirarchies" and the inherent "politics," and moving more into the open fields of such things as networks, communities, collaborating.

Through Howard, I met filmmaker Doug Block, who had made a documentary film on the rise of the internet and some of the early important players. Doug and I eventually started The D-Word Community in 1999. I was involved in the initial stages of getting it off the ground and then handed it over to Doug after about two years. It's since gone on to include 11,000 members in 127 countries. And the community is not just comprised of online interaction, but real world relationships, networking, and cooperative projects.

I've also been involved in the same way to establish world-wide communities in the areas of audio recording, music production, and audio equipment manufacturing.

I'm throwing all this out there to give some background and put out the idea that people can work and share together, collaborate, and promote and cheers on each others works and undertakings. And people can teach and learn from each other. These kinds of networks are leaderless. There is no hierarchy. There is no "system."

Erick makes a good point:

Quote:

Networks begin in places like this. Networks have no central authority. Recognition and network access is mutual and reciprocal. To access a network you have to be open to access by the other nodes in the network, and no node gets to dictate the processing done by any other nodes. What network participants agree on is universally useful standards of communication and common access protocols, and in some limited and usually temporary projects, common processing.

We could do that.

And communities and networks also give birth to other communities and networks. We've certainly seen the initial birthing of an "internals community" within Aikiweb and other places.There are also more and more aikidoka and other related martial artists practicing and exploring independently, and outside of any hierarchical organization. And there are some people who are really digging in and doing some serious and deep exploratory and innovative work within Aikido and other arts.

And it's not just enough to call these people and groups "independent" any more. Because it's important that they be able to find each other, join and share together. This has happened to a small degree. But we could do much much better. Even the idea of "third wave" aikido - or something similar - would be a start as a descriptor to establish the beginnings of a networked community around the world that could flourish, grow and prosper.

Like Erick said. "We could do that."

And to grab a quote and often-used tagline from Howard Rheingold, "What it is --- is up to us."

I just ran into something interesting and timely to this discussion. It seems that early "third wave" aikido pioneer, Stanley Pranin, has been over there ruminating in his microbrewery, and has started, My List of Problem Areas in Today’s Aikido

Google, as much a child of the Internet as any company on earth, fired all their project managers once. They weren't programmers, they weren't executives, all they were doing was adding layers between the people doing the work and the people making the decisions.

It was a disaster. Directors ended up with a hundred direct reports, and so none of the programmers could get guidance from decision makers when they needed it.

Ultimately they hired them all back. Google now has something like five layers between the programmers and the CEO. Some of this is a function of size: with 52,000 employees, you really do need concrete assignments of responsibilities.

Hierarchical structures are very good in some situations, disastrous in others. Same with decentralized networks. Decide what you want to accomplish, then think about the organizational structure best suited to achieving it.

I also think that most real-world organizations are hybrids, with both network and hierarchical components. The military has clear chains of command, but there are plenty of networks, too: people who were in the Academy together, people who served at a particular post together, people with particular kinds of expertise. The Web is a network, but most of its physical infrastructure is built and maintained by hierarchical organizations. The standards committees that manage the software infrastructure are largely comprised of hierarchical organizations. And so on.

Similarly in the martial arts world. The various organizations have clear "people in charge," granting ranks, approving dojos for membership, establishing grading requirements. But the best teachers are intellectually curious. Any attempt to prevent them from forming networks around "research" topics that interest them is doomed to failure.

What do you mean by "Technologically"? Within the field of technology? Isn't that a rather narrow slice of human endeavor, as contrasted with "all areas"?

I mean it in the sense of Lewis Mumford. A remarkably prescient view of the potential of hierachical dehumanizing organization of society. He also saw this in tension with what he termed the "polytechnic" (multi-centered networks of societal functions) with the continued activities of the "monotechnic" hierarchies. Human social organization in his view is a type of, the model for, and origin of what we now consider more narrowly "technological" operations using mechnical machines. The pyramids were built by a "mega-machine" -- formed of human components.

What Mumford did not anticipate is the degree of dependency that the prescriptive surveillance hierarchy state would have upon on network organizational forms and products for its functions -- and thus its resulting vulnerabilities to non-hierarchical network subversions, which we now see.

Returning to Aikido, we should orgnanize aikido on self-similar grounds to its underlying principles of study and action.

Aiki as a principle, I have found, is based on an appreciation of human beings as a network -- body(ies) and mind(s). Aiki connects two or more human beings in a network. The bodies, once connected, become a mutually operative network of sensorial and structural elements functioning together.

If the attacker commands the network, he uses one set of networked elements to destroy the other networked elements, by virtue of the command and control hierarchy of his attacking mind. Aiki demonstrates its capability to subvert the hierarchical mind's intention to attack -- by catastrophically compromising and then commanding the whole of the network functions, of both bodies without which the attacking mind cannot act, and using which, it can be made to act contrary to its hierarchical intention to attack. Whether the person using aiki chooses to use this vulnerability to premise an attack in turn is a different question.

Following this observation of aiki in operation, we may use that as a network organizing principle writ large. We ought not do not do away with our nominally hierarchical affiliations and existing network connections, just because we find unhealthy conflicts among them. -- We need to learn to reshape them by acting horizontally across all those those divides in ways that simply no longer respond to the hierarchical conflicts that originally drove unhealthy divisions. Hierarchy then becomes increasingly irrelevant, and to the extent opposed to this movement -- impotent.

Quote:

Is hierarchy inevitable? I'd argue that it isn't...but I'd also argue that it's a human tendency.

No argument there. The principal point I find is that hierarchy is collapsing under its own weight (again), and if not for the final time, then at a time when network as a viable replacement has achieved a sense of consciousness of itself, it powers and its place in the world (as opposed to the historical examples where they basically served as conscious placeholders waiting for the next hierarchy to inevitably assert itself). Will some hierarchy inevitably assert itself ? Yes. Will it inevitably prevail this time in what ever form it revives or survives its present slow-motion debacle ? -- That issue is now seriously in doubt, and perhaps for the first time in history.

Quote:

If you want to create a collective human endeavor without hierarchy, it must start with a very clear vision of what you want (and a realistic recognition of these human tendencies), and be followed thereafter with a constant struggle to prevent hierarchy from creeping in. It can't start from a "clear vision" on the part of a single iconoclast with a soapbox; an iconoclast's so-called "vision" is an anti-vision, by definition. It has to start with a vision of what you want to create, and it has to inspire more than just you and the mouse in your pocket. And not only does it not have to start with a vision that is broadly shared, but I'd argue that it's a mistake to start by seeking broad support. Inspire a few, then put your money where your mouth is. Create the thing you claim to want, even on the smallest scale, and inspire more people by the evidence of its merits.

You just very ably paraphrased the motivations and methods behind the medieval European monastic and university foundations. Iona, Lindisfarne, St. Gall, Bobbio, Sackingen, Citeaux, and many others were major monastic centers -- many founded by Irish monks -- perhaps explaining their distaste for more than merely local hierarchical authority. Universities at Paris, Bolgna, Padua, Oxford, Salamanca also formed - and all these centers were richly networked with one another and without regard to the feudal hierarchies in which they found themselves locally situated.

That is the model I suggested -- and it seems -- you appear to largely to agree with it.

Do you know of any other kind of art endeavor - such as music, painting, cooking, etc. - that requires people to kowtow ... to a political organization, teachers, technical form, and ranking structure?

I have never experienced the requirement of kowtow in my aikidō biography. So could you be so kind and help me to understand what you have in mind here?

Maybe this is why I don't get your point(s): I have never experienced a correlation of political strucures and the quality of aikidō. In my biography aikidō was and is transmitted through certain lines of student-teacher relationships. So it was never "the aikikai" that shaped my aikidō. But it was my teacher, his teachers, i.e. concrete persons not a political structure.
Being part of this lineage(s) and the network they provide I feel strongly connected to the a quality inherent in the teaching of aikidō.

Actually I think it is only the transmission of knowledge that provides the quality of aikidō. I think practicing budō is about transmission what is allready there. Not about searching and exploring by oneself.

wanted to edit the last sentence just a little bit ... timeout ... so here it is:

Actually I think it is only the transmission of knowledge that provides the quality of aikidō. I think practicing budō is about transmission of what is already there, transmission of what was known by those before us. It is not about searching and exploring. It is about finding and revealing.

Actually I think it is only the transmission of knowledge that provides the quality of aikidō. I think practicing budō is about transmission of what is already there, transmission of what was known by those before us. It is not about searching and exploring. It is about finding and revealing.

I absolutely disagree, Carsten. I want to go further. To do anything less would be a disservice to those who went before us. I did receive knowledge from my teachers, and I keep unpacking it. It's the gift that keeps on giving. I also receive new knowledge and new experiences that they never had. And I live in completely different times and surroundings and culture than they did.

My main aikido teacher said, "Budo must always reflect its surroundings. If it isn't newer and stronger, it isn't valid."

I'm not interested in the Budo of the last 25 years. I've already lived through it. Been there. Done that. I'm more interested in the Budo that will be evolving in the next 25 years.